Agricultural History Review, Volume 69 Part 2 (2022), p. 320

The development of tropical and semitropical frontiers comprises a dramatic chapter in late twentieth-century agricultural and environmental history. Particularly noteworthy is the transformation of Bolivia’s eastern lowlands over the last half century. The region’s largest department, Santa Cruz, witnessed an agro-export boom as hundreds of thousands of migrants converted native landscapes into soy farms and cattle ranches. Its capital, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, grew from a town of 40,000 to become the nation’s largest city with a population of over 2 million. All along, economic growth defied political upheaval, as Bolivia careened from revolutionary to authoritarian to neoliberal regime. Ben Nobbs-Thiessen’s illuminating study situates eastern Bolivia’s take-off in the migration of peoples, plants, technologies, and ideologies. In the historian’s able hands, such flows are reconstructed through multinational narratives that trace territorial displacements, sociopolitical tensions, and agroecological transformation. Boldly conceptualized, richly documented, and elegantly written, the book is much more than another case study of regional development in Latin America. How this one-time backwater became its nation’s economic powerhouse is a parable of twentieth-century global capitalism and geopolitics.

Bolivia’s ‘March to the East’ was a state-backed project of frontier expansion unveiled by the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement after assuming power in 1952. Over-reliance on tin exports and food imports, demographic strains on highland Andean landholdings, a history of humiliating wartime territorial losses, and U.S.-subsidized Cold War developmental priorities roused a new-found urgency among Bolivia’s leadership to colonize the fertile and more sparsely populated lowland regions. Mass media played its part. In a delightful chapter analysing the oeuvre of the peripatetic Bolivian filmmaker Jorge Ruiz, backed by the state’s Instituto Cinematográfico Boliviano and the U.S. government, Nobbs-Thiessen analyzes the documentaries that showcased highland-lowland migration as a bridge for the nation’s socioeconomic, regional, and racial divides. Like the gendered ‘foundational fictions’ of nineteenth-century Latin America nationalist literature dissected by Doris Sommer, Ruiz’s plots centered too on the romantic unions between Indigenous highlanders (kollas) and largely mestizo lowlanders (cambas), with the latter often feminized in these odes to progress.

Change was, in fact, coming to eastern Bolivia in the mid-1950s, with the arrival of railways linking Santa Cruz to the Brazilian and Argentine borders and an interregional highway to Cochabamba. And from the get-go, cruceños avid for investment ranted at federal infringements on regional autonomy and at the influx of outsiders in scarcely camouflaged racist language. The core of the study, however, focuses on the origins of disparate human flows to eastern Bolivia – Okinawans and Japanese, Mennonites, and Andeans – and their impact on frontier development. While previous works compartmentalized the groups’ trajectories, Nobbs-Thiessen’s layered approach parts ways from traditional monoethnic studies of migration, allowing for broader insights into their commonalities and divergences. Agrarian populations with collective histories of displacement and transregional ties, the three groups, notwithstanding racial and religious differences, formed part of the flotsam and jetsam of twentieth-century globalization. Victims of Japanese imperialism and postwar U.S. military occupation, Okinawans were lured to South America by colonization projects promoted by the U.S. and Bolivian governments. Japanese colonists arrived as well. In their peregrinations, the Okinawans’ paths converged with another Diasporic people, the Mennonites, who streamed in from Paraguay, Canada, and, predominantly, Mexico. The latter, distressed by overcrowding, drought, and the evangelizing/ cultural influences of U.S. and Canadian coreligionists, turned to Bolivia in the late 1960s, where the promise of agricultural cooperatives, exemptions from military service and public education, and the importation of duty-free machinery beckoned. Andeans, whose hardscrabble conditions had dispatched hundreds of thousands of household members for seasonal labor in Argentina, marched to the East in search of a plot of land, as ‘spontaneous’ migration far outstripped official colonization. In other words, a region at the margins was soon to be remade by settlers squeezed from other global peripheries.

Nobbs-Thiessen underscores the hardships endured by migrants lacking secure title and credit, local environmental knowledge, agricultural extension, and access to markets. Those hailing from Asia and the Andes confronted cruceños’ racism as well. Yet in the absence of backing from the Bolivian state, those more fortunate, and the Mennonites, in particular, counted on infrastructural and social service support from Protestant religious organizations, whose relations with U.S. development agencies and Bolivian government bureaus proved rather fluid. All three migrant groups clamored for the rights of ‘agrarian citizenship’ as frontier pioneers, resorting at times to acts of civil disobedience to protest their abandonment by state officials.

In a particularly evocative mise en scène, Nobbs-Thiessen juxtaposes the historical trajectories of two interlopers in the eastern lowlands in 1967: the insurrectionary foray of Che Guevara among the Bolivian peasantry, and a party of Mexican Mennonites scouting out lands for future settlement. While the former’s doom is one of Cold War Latin America’s watermarks, the fate of the latter encapsulates Santa Cruz’s actual ‘revolutionary’ transformation over the next half century. Over the course of the 1970s, links to Mennonite communities in North and South America facilitated the acquisition of tractors, agricultural machinery, and livestock to establish a dairy industry in the region. (Japanese and Okinawan settlers focused on commercial rice cultivation, while Andean colonies planted sugarcane, rice, and corn. Cotton would also enjoy a boom into the mid-1970s.) Yet it was another migrant to the lowlands – soy – whose proliferation relied on the plant’s adaptation to tropical and subtropical latitudes (advanced by U.S.-trained Brazilian agricultural engineers), rising global demand for livestock feed, and Bolivia’s turn to neoliberalism in the mid-1980s, that propelled the region’s skyrocketing agribusiness, with Mennonites prominently at the helm. Not that such sagas, pace Jorge Ruiz, would have their full Hollywood endings: following the presidential election of Evo Morales in 2005, Santa Cruz, as the center of economic power, would rally for regional autonomy from Andean highland control.

While Nobbs-Thiessen weaves multiple threads, the Mennonites’ saga, meticulously reconstructed through archival sources and oral histories, overshadows that of other migrants. Collectively, the migration narratives crowd out a more comprehensive history of the receiving regions and their local populations, which emerges only sporadically amid extensive reconstruction of extra-regional processes. Nevertheless, Nobbs-Thiessen has provided a compelling account of Bolivia’s ‘March to the East’ that will not only be of significant interest to historians of Latin America but scholars of twentieth-century migration and comparative frontiers in general.